So, I went to a card store yesterday, in order to pick up a few things for my Grixmas Secret Santa. I live about an hour and a half away from this store, so I don't get to go very often. I prepared a list of things that I wanted to buy and set to it. In the end, I bought this:

The pile of cards on the left is the pile I bought for myself from the list that I took. The pile in the middle are the cards I got for my Secret Santa. And the pile on the right are my impulse purchases .

Now, a good 20 or so of those are new Legends, so that I can make new EDH decks, and another 20 or so of those are Standard cards that I needed (but forgot to list), but the rest of them are just plain "Oh, that seems like a good card in Commander. I ought to get that." Included in that pile is a Doubling Season that I never thought I'd buy but decided to treat myself to anyway.

When I first got back into magic I traded away ~6 of those at $15 a pop. You can have my uncommon and I'll take half a dozen rares/mythics for it... Was one of the most lopsided trades I've ever made even though it was technically pretty fair value wise.

I cant help from buying foil upgrades to cards I already have. I am always trolling the foil binder at the LGS for somethingshiny. Although many are only $0.50-2.00, it adds up over time.

This. I have someone coming over with a box of foils that he put together when he cleaned up his gaming room and he estimates it at about 500+ unsorted of all rarities. If he leaves my place with more than half, I'd be surprised.

I was just doing my grixis shopping and I ended up separating everything I wanted, including gifts and it was like 1,200 bucks. So I said screw it put most the grixis stuff back and it came down to 1,150 and realized that I needed to put some of my stuff back too. Ended up trimming it down to 335, but man it was a lot of things tacked on, but 280 was planned, 20 was grixis, and 35 was impulse purchases.

Well, earlier this year when I got my tax refund for 2012, I bought a set of 40x Revised Duals. Got 'em for a steal though. Saved well over $1200 compared to buying them piecemeal. That's the big one, but I probably make close to 50 ill-advised impulse buys every single year. Most are small, but not always. I did buy case of Theros because I could and I've been dreaming of doing so since, oh, Invasion came out. This was the first time I actually COULD do it, and Theros was crazy with value so it seemed like a good time to indulge my long-standing dream.

Oh and I needed to order a Mana Echoes and a Descent into Madness from SCG, so I went on last Friday to get those. I didn't want to pay more for shipping than for my actual order, though. So I decided to pick up a judge foil Bribery for $40.00. Then I remembered I needed something else, and an hour and a half later, I had $200 in my Wishlist. I ended up having to put back the Bribery and some other stuff to get my total back down, but I ended up spending $106 and change anyway.

I used to impulse buy a lot of cards, but I've since been doing pretty good about not just buying everything. The last big purchase I made was $130 for an Underground Sea in good condition, the price set because the person really wanted the money (I didn't even haggle her down on the price, because it was too good to pass up already). That was about a month ago now, and past buying about $30 in cards for Grixmas possibilities I haven't bought any other cards.

I think my biggest advantage is I don't really care too much to be a collector. Nice shiny cards are cool, but I don't feel the need to go out of my way to foil every card in every deck. For instance, I didn't mind buying three Survival of the Fittest for about $15 sometime last year due to their slightly bent and worn appearance. I'll still play the card and it was three more than I had before that (I didn't have a single one before that).

Anyway, I'm mostly dreading having to figure out whether or not I want to waste a bunch of money on a Tarmogoyf for my Cube or not. I've been tempted to just make my own image for one, and make my own card for Tarmogoyf. I suppose I'm getting less and less impressed with the cost of cards these days.

Wanted to tune up my Derevi build.Went online to my LGS, bought $25 worth of cards.Then went to the LGS, got another $40 worth of "essentials" But hey, now my Deck is really, really good and people won't travel with me in the same car. :p